


we'll marry our fortunes together

by jontinf



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Diners, Budding Romance, Depression, Erased Memory, F/M, Male-Female Friendship, Musical References, Sexual Content, Street Musician, Suicide Attempt, Waiters & Waitresses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-04-24 09:38:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4914490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jontinf/pseuds/jontinf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twelve is a busker and Clara is a waitress. They forge an unlikely bond after he visits her diner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [veradune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/veradune/gifts).



A storm from the previous night derails all of London’s trains. They name it after one of the twelve apostles, a kind of nod to the biblical proportions of damage done to the city's rush hour.

Clara looks ahead longingly at the turnstiles as commuters arrive from the trains behind her. They move slowly, a listless sea of black and grey. It’s already taken her two hours to make it to Central London from the East End. She tensely smooths the creases in her uniform, a bright blue dress nipped at the waist. It makes for chilly legs, a luxury of deep breaths, and renders her an anachronism walking the streets.

Her ultimate destination, should she reach it, is  _Eddie’s Diner,_ a theme restaurant in Soho modelled after America’s post war diners.

Above it all, Clara notices the sound of a guitar and a gravelly voice singing an homage to the periodic table. She smirks. The notion of such a thing right then charmingly ridiculous. None of the others seem to notice, miserably shuffling forward, like forced enlistees in the Children’s Crusade.

After a frustrating minute of peeking over shoulders, she finally spots him against a wall. White hair and a Ferrari red guitar. He looks once-famous, rakish and sinewy, quick, long fingers and lips curling as he precisely annunciates each of the chemical elements. _Argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium_. The only person in history to sing the tune of the Major General’s Song with such a serious yet comic energy, something no one has a right to at this hour, and after one of the worst storms in the country’s history.

Clara looks back at the busker as the crowd pushes her away. He casually holds his guitar to his side, right leg kicking forward, chewing the scenery.

She imagines him falling to the Earth the previous night alongside the collapsing cranes, the power outages, and the 120 miles per hour gusts of wind; indulges in the thought of the likes of him strolling medieval countrysides as a troubadour, who flees towns each time he vexes some lord, incites a rebellion, and draws the eye of an illustrious woman.

 

 

 

Most of the morning is spent salvaging food that's defrosted in the freezer. Business is unsurprisingly slow, and the bulk of  _Eddie's_ staff dawdles in after her.

The busker’s song replays in her head until she sees him again that afternoon in Soho Square, this time singing Pink Floyd next to a statue of Charles II, surrounded by Hare Krishnas and scattered debris of litter and tree branches. A page out of  _Where's Wally?_

The following day, he’s back in her station singing an homage to Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger.”

The busker becomes a mainstay in her periphery, an assured landmark of her commute, each morning a guessing game of what he’ll sing next, his hopping around, unable to find it in himself to commit to any genre.

Sometimes she thinks he plays a little louder when seeing her turn the corner. She offers him a smile or a few coins in return for the reminder that there is music in the world, and all is not as bad as it could be.

They squeeze into station lifts, always stand on opposite sides, and exchange looks over those they deem worthy of quiet ridicule: a couple whose PDA nearly knocks off his glasses, dead eyed toddlers throwing tantrums and stomping his shoe, a woman muttering about how nobody speaks English anymore after hearing his Scottish accent.

He soldiers on, and she's endeared.

She once catches his sneaking a piece of his lunch to a lonely beagle tied to a cycle dock. He stares at it hesitantly, as if warning it against falling in love, then pats its little head with a forthcoming firmness and walks away.

Clara decides to introduce herself after that and finds herself inventing scenarios in her mind on how to strike up a casual rapport. She could be running late to work, he’d give her a cheeky grin, and joke, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell.”

 _Right, that’s rubbish_ , she thinks, as if she'd ever risk being late to work ever again. Before the storm, she’d never been late to anything in her life and doesn’t plan on making a habit.

She’s also never seen him crack a smile. He might have smiled at a little girl once after she put ten pence in his case, but there’s a chance that was wishful thinking. It was probably a _grimace_. Get off my lawn. That sort of thing.

Why does she fancy him again? _Fancy_. There’s a dangerous word. No need to get carried away. Crikey, he’s old enough to be—well, _she’s_ old enough to know better.

This is an academic interest, like bird watching or stamp collecting. Nobody ever hopes to shag mail item accessories.

It goes on for a week, her overthinking it, doing her best not to look at him when she's passing by, as if there’s a chance he’s standing there only in his pants.

Then one night, he surprises her by joining her on the platform while she’s waiting for a train. Her mad busker wearing his obstinate pout like he's never been happy in his entire life.

 

 

 

He doesn’t notice her sitting on the bench, and with a fond self-consciousness, she allows him to walk away and suppresses the urge to greet him—or more tempting, laugh behind his back over how seriously he seems to take himself.

She instead hides her face in a stray newspaper and intently focuses on the travel section, depressing in itself, since she can barely afford to travel past zone four.

Another man steps onto the platform. Savile Row suit, middle aged, and as stricken as someone who’s lost his fortune twice in one day. 

His briefcase and umbrella are relinquished to the ground as he creeps closer to the platform’s edge and steps over the yellow boundary line. He fixates on the tracks and looks up at the departure board with resignation. One minute left.

Clara's heart pounds when she grasps what he’s about to do, on what she knows _she_ will have to do. The newspaper slips from her hand as she quickly rises.

The busker beats her to it, his fingers fastening around the crook of the man’s arm, making the latter stiffen. They stand close enough to resemble lovers. The busker’s mouth to his ear and grip so tight that she worries he might hurt him.

The train barrels past them while the busker whispers. His expression inscrutable. Her mind wanders to the morbid, the violence of flesh and guts against merciless impetus of steel.

When the train is out of sight, he releases the man and calmly backs away. Yielding back to him the ownership of his death. Clara disagrees, brims with outrage, and steps closer, preparing to single-handedly stop the man if necessary. She won't watch someone die tonight. Not again.

The man remains frozen. His breathing unsteady and palms outstretched. Her eyes close and relief floods her chest when he finally steps back behind the boundary line and silently crouches down to pick up his things.

The busker only stands above him and observes him with a scientist's detachment.

The man, visibly embarrassed, doesn’t acknowledge either of them, and when he boards the next train, he seats himself so he faces the platform, sweat-soaked hair sticking to his skin. He lifts a hand to loosen his tie and looks at Clara as the doors close. A tentative gratefulness washes over him. The train whisks him away.

They're left alone to wait for the next train.

The busker stands upright and stares straight ahead at an advert for discounted flights to North Africa. There’s a callousness in how deliberately he pretends that she isn’t there, a nuisance, an unhappy memory.

She wonders how such a person could persuade a man without hope into facing another day, how he could protect a life as though doing so were a visceral need within him.

 

 

 

The next day, Clara grins her way out of the diner’s kitchen, having won a fiver on a bet with the cooks on the identity of the murderer on  _EastEnders_.

She practically stumbles into the busker as he staggers into the restaurant with all the awkwardness and vigilance of a wrong turn, a guitar strapped to his back, a punk rock refugee.

He peers at the note under his nose through dark glasses and then up at her, like she might actually be propositioning him, fiver for a quickie behind the alley. She gapes and feels like a total git for it. She hadn't seen him this morning and thought she’d never see him again.

Every head in the restaurant has turned their way, his reedy figure shifting, blocking the wintry daylight. Chuck Berry swans out of the jukebox right then to strum the story of Johnny B. Goode. The busker’s mouth twitches as if he’s overheard his own name. _He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack_ , Chuck sings.

Clara moves out of his way so he can pull a chair at the nearest table. He props his instrument against the edge. They lock eyes again as fleetingly as shoulders brushing in a crowd, and he settles into his seat and fusses at the wool of fingerless gloves, fully aware that all eyes are on him.

A nasal voice tsks an  _“oh, no”_ with the tone of a put upon governess. It’s Phil, a server-in-arms and the most dedicated brownnoser she’s met in her life. He dumps his washcloth on the counter, tucks peroxide blonde hair into his hairnet, and marches off to escort out the undesirables. 

“We don’t serve beggars,” Phil says, apparently under the illusion that he’s in a Victor Hugo novel, despite the busker being  _exactly_  the kind of clientele found at an American diner in the fifties, the very gimmick of the establishment.

A thrum of second-hand embarrassment descends on the room with no one sure of whom to feel more embarrassed for. The busker looks past Phil in an air of weary superiority, tasked with reasoning with a belligerent classist child. His mouth hangs slightly ajar. “I’m not a beggar.”

“Piss off, Phil.” Clara plucks out her notepad, poises her pencil, and then addresses the busker cheerfully. “What’ll you have?”

The public humiliation leaves Phil fuming. “Boss’ll hear about this.”

She turns to seethe disdain at the boy towering over her. She won’t break eye contact. “You make sure he does.”

Phil blinks, backs away, and tosses out a scornful look before he leaves.

She returns to her customer. “Sir,” she says, more a direct order than a request.

The busker studies her as though he might worry for her sanity. “Coffee,” he says. “Coffee… and chips. Side of, er, jam.”

She mimics his expression, the questioning of sanity. These are his first words to her. “Jam.”

“Yeah.”

Clara averts her eyes. Her mouth gives way to a small smile. “Sure.”

She goes straight to the counter, rips out his order, and sets it next to others on the ledge. The three items one after another belong in a Mad Hatter tea party.

Maisie nudges her with an elbow, coffee pot in hand. “He’s mysterious.”

“Is he?”

“Kind of fit too.”

Clara scoffs, not necessarily because she disagrees, but because she rather not dwell on such things. “Okay.”

“And there he goes.”

She spins around to watch the door close behind him. Her heart sinks. Even more so when she spots Phil sneering triumphantly behind the soda machines.

Maisie looks at her with a pinch of sympathy—and curiosity. “Shall we cancel his order?”

Clara’s gaze fixes on the recently abandoned table with bullish resolve. “No.”

 

 

 

The station is near empty. He’s crouched down to pack his things when the whitest trainers he’s ever seen steps into his eyeline. He looks up to find the waitress from the morning. She's holding a small greasy paper bag with an image of the eponymous Eddie winking at him, cowboy hat, finger guns, and all.

“You left before your order was ready,” she says.

He snaps his guitar case closed and heaves it onto his shoulder. “I didn’t like the attention.”

“You’re a busker.”

“That’s a different kind of attention.”

She silently offers him his brunch. He doesn’t know what else to do but take it, bowing his gaze to her shins, feeling it indelicate to look otherwise. “Why are you so kind to me?”

“You put my day to music. It’s the only thing that makes things bearable sometimes.” She takes a deep breath and looks at the remnants of a closed down pasty shop. They found a rat there the other day. “I saw you with that man. That night on the platform. You held his arm, said something to him, kept him from jumping.”

He looks at her with confusion, as if she’s mistaken him with someone else.

“What did you say to him?” she asks softly.

“Why?" he snaps. "You thinking of jumping?”

Her face falls, and he regrets it immediately, like coming out of a trance, horrified with himself for being the one to cause her any hurt.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. Sometimes—I say things I don’t mean.”

She doesn’t look like she’s ready to forgive him, a decision he’d entirely accept. If he were the type, the next order of business would be self-flagellation, followed by an entire month of playing nothing but Jedward or something equally, soul crushingly crap.

“You must’ve insulted the will to live back into him,” he hears her say. She’s not exactly smiling, but she doesn’t seem like she wants nothing to do with him either. Mostly, she seems pleased with herself.

So is he. She’s tough. Her job probably obliges it. Still no excuse for what he said.

He breathes out a laugh, relieved that no real damage was done. “Something like that.”

She moves to leave. He’s a stranger on the street after all. Better left at that. But then she takes a second look, as though she sees a sort of hurtability in him that makes her worry about  _his_ walking down the street alone, a living, breathing vessel of broken bones.

She clasps his hand in hers and heartily shakes it. “Clara,” she says.

Being touched makes him want to stop breathing, fight or flight, such nearness bearing the impact of a slap in the face. “Smith,” he manages. “Marcus.”

Her eyes go wide. They comprise at least sixty percent of her face, he reckons.

“As in Aurelius?” she asks.

“What?”

Still shaking his hand, she laughs, mutters, “Never mind.” They blink at each other, a duet of social awkwardness. “I’ll talk to you later, then.”

Marcus wrenches his hand free, stretching out his long fingers as though they might’ve developed cramp. “Probably not.”

She smiles incredulously. “Is that how you treat a friend?”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“Why not?”

“No time.”

Her eyes narrow on him, some hare-brained scheme cooking. She has a terrible poker face, but he already knows he’ll let her get away with it. He’s curious. For some reason.  _Contrary to reason._

“I suppose I’ll have to find another route then,” she says.

Marcus frowns. “Why?”

“Well, running into you every single day and not acknowledging each other is bound to get awkward.”

He keeps frowning, the town wise man confronted with an impossible dilemma. “What kind of commitment is friendship?”

She gestures past the turnstiles. “The ten minute walk from my diner to the tube. How about that?”

“What else do I have to do?”

“You sound like you’ve never had a mate in your life.”

“Not in a long while.” He’s proud of this, having cracked the next chapter of human evolution, thriving under utter social isolation.

 _Not bloody likely,_  her expression tells him.

“Um, well,” she thinks, “if I want to buy a dress, you need to be brutally honest about it.”

He nods and points. “Your shoes belong in a convalescence hospital—”

“—and shut up after I’ve purchased them.”

“Right,” he says, chastened.

“If I ever get in a row with my boyfriend, you always take my side.”

His brow rises. “You have a boyfriend?”

“Not in ages,” she admits. There’s a story behind that, he suspects. “Do you?”

“No.”

She tilts her head. “Girlfriend?”

He leans back, pretending to brace himself for an impending stampede of imaginary women. “Thousands, actually. I’m meeting one after this.”

She plays along, what friends do. “Girlfriends, highly recommend them. What are you looking for?”

They begin to walk toward the turnstiles, his fingers digging up his Oyster from his jacket pocket. She moves alongside him, her feet shuffling forward as though this were something they did on a nightly basis.

“Tall. Blonde. Sharp features.” He eyes her. “You?”

She grins. “Young.”

 

 

 

He disappears after that night. No sign of him even at the station. She wonders if she’ll find him stabbed in the evening papers, or worse, that he’s avoiding her, letting her down easy without actually doing it. She doesn’t know why she’d take it so personally, what exactly is lacking in her life that she wants to make a project of him.

Ten days later, she finds him standing across the street from her diner, a hapless old spirit stuck in the land of the living. He catches her just as she’s walking out the door.

“Hi,” he only says, his hair improbably longer. He wears a new grey coat that hangs loosely from his shoulders. If she hadn’t known any better, she’d think he stepped out of the eighties.

She's glad to see him alive and waves with too much enthusiasm. “I thought I scared you away. You alright?”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t elaborate, of course. "I, uh, I wanted to know your opinion on something." They stare at each other, cars gliding between them and overcome with a nervousness and hesitance one might have with a person who doesn’t speak the same language, a sudden compulsion to explain themselves, find the physical gestures to bridge the gulf between disparate cultures.

“How was your day?” He shouts like he’s not used to raising his voice, like doing so strains it. Yet he sings for a living. "That's something you ask a friend, right?"

Her eyes light up. “Yeah,” she yells back over the traffic, which only becomes louder.

What do friends do? Put up with each other. She and Maise bonded over  _Marie Claire’s_  sex quizzes. She’d rather die than watch him take a sex quiz.

He puts his hand to his ear and shakes his head. “How was your—” A bus parks itself in front of him, leaving her talking to a giant advert for a hair loss tonic. He’s gone when the bus drives away.

“Sorry,” he says. She jumps. He’s standing next to her out of breath. _Jesus._ Maybe he  _is_  a ghost. Died in a great industrial fire or something. “Sorry,” he repeats. He allows himself to grin at her, his nose crinkling. She grins back. “You were saying?”

“Oh,” she says, “well, today, I slayed dragons, brought balance to the Force. Same old. You?”

They begin walking in the direction of the tube as he pouts, mostly in good humour. “Incorporated Beethoven into the Stooges during lunch hour. Nobody noticed. Or they were too embarrassed to say anything.”

She smiles. “What else do you like to play?”

“Bowie. The Beatles. On occasion, Eurovision's greatest hits.”

“You better not be kidding about that.” She pokes her tongue against her cheek and feels sixteen-years-old, all the fumbling and um-ing and long pausing while trying to make conversation. Girls were always easier. Then again, she said the same thing about boys when trying to talk to girls.

Hold on. He likes the Beatles?

“When I was seven,” she says, “I wrote George Harrison a letter every week.”

He looks concerned, and she can’t tell if he’s teasing her, or if that’s the way he is. Taking everything too seriously.

He replies, “Was it awkward for him to order a restraining order against a seven-year-old?”

 

 

She wakes up to her shoe box flat enveloped in pitch blackness and brutal cold and then soldiers through thunder and mist, scant a person in sight. Horror film weather.

She spots him in her peripheral on the way to work, hunched over in a Victorian cemetery turned public park, hand shielding an old sketchbook against light drops of rain. His collar is upturned under a large wool scarf. The red lining of his jacket offers a punch of colour to the surrounding urban decay. He’s sketching the charred and cracked part of a tree branch that’s been hit by lightning.

“Cheery one, aren’t you?” she says over his shoulder.

“Have you ever thought about how electricity literally shoots down from our skies? The majesty and menace of it.”

“Uh huh.” She wonders how she managed to stumble upon a lost member of the Addams Family. They at least had a sense of fun. "Have you ever thought about how fifty percent of soda dispensers are filled with fecal matter?"

He sets down his pencil and looks back at her. "Whose?"

"I don't think it's one specific person."

 

 

 

“I’m good at sums,” she tells him over an Egg McMuffin. They have enough time for a quick breakfast at McDonalds, the only thing open at this hour. He's dumped a handful of sugar into his coffee. The woman minding the checkout was aghast by it. “Maths in general. Comes in handy on the job, obviously.”

“What’s sixty four times eighty nine?”

“Five thousand, six hundred and ninety… six?”

He blinks. “If you say so. Thinking about teaching maths?”

She once knew someone who wanted to teach maths. He also happened to be the only person she'd ever been interested in loving. He died before her twentieth birthday, and she ran away from university, suddenly uncertain of what to do with herself, unable to stand being an object of pity. The diner was a way of staying in London, a means to an— a means to something.

Her mother was a teacher, also deceased. Enough time has passed to imagine that teaching may be something she could see herself doing. The irony isn’t lost on her.

She answers, “English, actually.”

“As a second language?”

“As literature.” Clara laughs. “Teach literature for a living. Maybe travel the world doing it.”

He imagines this for her. The lines on his face soften. “Sounds nice.”

“What about you?”

He gazes off into the distance, perhaps on the verge of revealing a deep dark secret about his past. She awaits it, this backstory, the key to understanding what’s made him.

Then he shrugs. “Busker.”

“But you want to be discovered, right?”

“Discovered? Why would I want that?”

He’s actually not kidding.

“Well, how’d you become a busker?”

“Quit my job.”

“That explains so much. Thank you.”

The sarcasm goes over his head, his attention veering to a clock behind her, something he regards like a prisoner might a jailor. There’s a thought. Maybe he was an escaped convict like Abel Magwitch in  _Great Expectations_.

“We should probably be off,” he says. “You have a shift, right?”

She sighs. Here she is, on the verge of getting to the heart of a true crime-cum-ghost story… thing, and she has to wait tables instead. “Right.”

The streets are apocalyptically quiet when he turns a corner a block away from her work. She appears in a blur of white, blue, and the most determined ponytail in history and scares the living daylights out of him. If teaching never works out, she could have a promising career pulling knives on gangly street musicians.

_“What?”_

“No talking,” she says, inserting the earbuds of her ancient, scratched up iPod into his ears. “I present to you the five greatest songs that have ever existed.”

This has to do with an argument the previous day when he called her taste in music "low level." For some reason, that made him a snob, a knob, and deserving of being subjected to her truly embarrassing musical inclinations. Blimey, friendship is exhausting.

When he hears the first chords for “Here Comes the Sun,” his expression of abject confusion and irritation melts into a goofy, gummy grin. She looks back at it him with more zeal than he thought possible for anyone who could say  _Eddie’s Spotted Dick_ with a straight face.

“A song written by George Harrison,” he says. “What a  _shock_.”

“You.” She removes one bud from his ear. “Still not talking.”

“So—” she starts and then interrupts herself, gathering her thoughts, getting lost in the story before she tells it. “My mum once had us both bunk school for an afternoon when I was eleven. We went to the Pleasure Beach and sang along to the radio on the drive home. This was playing.” Clara lets out a giggle so _idiotically_ charming he almost resents her for it. “Mum could barely hold a tune, but I’d never seen anyone look more beautiful.”

She smiles to herself. Everything anyone would need to know about her manifested in that smile.

He feels so inexplicably overwhelmed with protectiveness that his lungs might burst, as though he could wage any battle on her behalf. “That’s where you get it from.”

“What?”

He clears his throat and nonchalantly scratches his scalp, doing his best to deflect. “Poor singing.”

“You’ve never even heard me sing.”

He points at her nose. “You have that off-key kind of face. You can just tell.”

She laughs, “Shut up.”

They wander in silence in the song’s last minute, and he offers her the extra earbud to listen along with him. “Dare I ask about song number two?”

 

He leans against the diner window the following night, rubs his cold hands together, and shoves them in the pockets of his trench. The slim smile that he wears promises mischief. “Crap day?” he asks.

She’s closing up shop, the buttons of her coat half undone, and absolutely prepared to fling her day into the depths of the ether where other miserable days go to die.

Clara slips the keys into her purse and studies his face sceptically. “Not the best.”

He gets to the point. Small talk was never his forte. “Detour,” he says. “Might take more than ten minutes.” His front teeth nip at his lip, a habit when posing a question he isn’t entirely confident about. “Alright with that?”

It takes her a moment to register this invitation for adventure. A wide grin blooms on her face when it does, like that of a child finding extra presents under the tree. “Yeah.”

He frowns. “Really? For all you know, I could be taking you to look at a dead rat in a car park.”

She rolls her eyes. “ _Marcus_.”

He tilts his head in the opposite direction of their usual route. “This way.”

The detour leads to a record shop on Broadwick in between a Pret A Manger and a hairdresser’s, each of its dirty window panes painted over in acrylic etchings of creatures out of someone’s acid trip, the amiable kind that later inspire children’s programming.

“The Cheeky Ostrich,” he proudly announces. “In business since 1969.”

“And _closed_  for business since eight o’clock.”

He retrieves a single key from inside his coat and holds it to her face. “Oh, ye of little faith.” He then unlocks the door and invites her inside with the wave of a hand. “After you.”

Marcus feels around for the light switch behind her as she enters the shop. The bulbs overhead flicker on one by one to reveal cavernous, endless rows of tables bearing old vinyls.

She pops her head outside and then back in again. “How is it so much bigger on the inside?”

“Edwardian engineers. Widely underestimated for their skills for space maximising. There’s a BBC Three programme all about it.”

“I’m sure.” She brushes her fingertips over the plastic covers of the LPs, carefully appraising her surroundings. Old autographed posters of the greats hanging in cheap black frames. Flyers pinned on top of flyers. Bargain bins. The stained, primeval carpet. A black cat. She does a double take.

Marcus crouches down and sweeps it into his arms. “Shop cat. Lord Byron.”

“Lord Byron?” She offers him another surprised grin.

“For his epicurean excesses,” he explains. The cat mutedly purrs when Clara strokes a spot behind its ear. “And his notable fondness for pretty w—well-read women and men.”

They both very pointedly avoid looking each other in the eye. The shared flush in their cheeks go unnoticed by everyone in the room. The cat couldn’t be bothered anyway, who loses interest and leaves Marcus’s arms.

“Right,” Clara says.

Marcus watches her sift through a stack of LPs as he rests his elbows on a stack on his end of the table. “These hallowed halls house  _my_  five greatest songs that have ever existed.”

He pulls out an LP from the stack in front of him and dives behind the cashier’s desk to lift the dust cover off of the turntable. “First stop: Bowie.”

“How do you have a key to this place?” she asks.

“I got a job here not long after leaving Glasgow as a teenager.” He lifts the arm of the record player and places the needle on the track. “They never changed the locks.”

“And why did you stop—”

“ _JITTERBUG!_ ” a synthesized sounding voice (boom) booms into the room, followed by rhythmic, excited clapping.

Marcus’s eyes widen in dismay as Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” begins playing in full volume. Lord Byron, as ever, paws at the floor in distress.

Clara’s head bows in quiet laughter as these hallowed halls are doused with the dulcet tones of the number one pop hit of 1984. He sees the utter delight in her eyes when she looks up at him, maybe imagining his wearing George Michael’s yellow knit gloves and pastel pink shirt. Humiliating. He’s salvaged her day at least.

The record screeches to a halt, making Lord Byron jump, and is replaced by the LP found in the cover of Wham!’s  _Make it Big_.

Marcus sighs, sprawls his arms against furniture, and announces, “David. Robert. Jones …Bowie.”

To his relief, he hears the opening percussion for David Bowie’s “Five Years,” and the mood in the room sedates, but only in the absence of silliness. The cheer lingers, another sort of delight gleaming in her eyes upon being reacquainted with the song’s elegant, epic melancholy.

He feels bashful having to stand in a room alone with someone without saying anything for so long, having her react with such gentleness to something he’s shared.

There wasn’t any quaint life moment tied to any of his favourites. He first heard this one on a car radio when he was thirteen. His boyhood was rust and downcast skies. Some bloke was pissing on a tenement wall under misspelled sectarian graffiti while a gang of older boys were kicking books out of his hands. It was all a very special episode of television.

“Be honest,” she finally says. “You really meant to play Wham! all along. The whole cool rocker thing is just an act, isn’t it?”

Marcus ducks behind the desk to retrieve something. It actually wouldn’t be incorrect to suggest that he was disposed to Wham! on occasion. He’s not entirely heartless. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He emerges with two bottles of lager in hand, more where that came from, his legacy from his tenure. Not that they’ve been sitting there since the seventies.

“Crap day, right?”

They stagger down Berwick Street afterward, their shoulders colliding, having drunken themselves into sloppy, manic delight and singing at the top of their lungs.

 _“Hang the DJ! Hang the Deee Jaaaay!”_ They do their very best Morrissey, hips swivelling and jaws clenching.

“Not you, sir,” Marcus reassures a man a few steps ahead, who glances back at them with a disapproving sort of concern, like they might mug him, or worse, further exacerbate the welfare state.

When the man reacts by only walking faster, they burst into a fit of giggles, doubling over and hanging on to each other, their bones having become elastic and making them at risk of flopping onto the ground.

Marcus takes a deep breath and wipes a tear from his eye. “We need to be serious.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she agrees in her most prim schoolmarm voice, smoothing both hands over her hair to fix it into place.

“It’s—it’s really important that we—” he hiccups, and his long leg takes the most exaggerated step over a puddle. “—we need to do our ver-very best—”

He turns to Clara whose face is contorting as she tries to hold in a laugh. She claps a hand over her eyes, shoos at him with the other, and says at a pitch so high that dogs might hear, “No, no, don’t look at me. Your face is so— _we’re being serious._ ”

His second leg drops straight into the puddle, and he sputters, the giggles erupting from his throat. She follows suit, and they nearly asphyxiate on the spot.

Whether the severe headache the next day is from the hangover, the laughing, or both is anyone’s guess.

 

 

 

It’s become a mission of Clara’s to get him to try new things. Like cantaloupe and chutney and considering the feelings of others.

She impulsively pushes him into a Primark when a mannequin in a window piques her interest. The day calls for a  _Pretty Woman_  moment. He replies that nobody has  _Pretty Woman_  moments in Primark on top of the fact that neither she nor he had access to the account of a rich businessman.

“Hence, Primark, my dear Watson,” she says.

He looks sheepishly at himself in a black hoodie in the dressing room mirror, flicking at the hood like a loose tooth, shoulders slumped in defeat.

“I’ve already befriended a woman half my age. I’m treading on dangerous ground as far as clichés are concerned.”

“You’re a stroppy penniless busker.” She circles him, chin in her hand like an art critic, pleased with the results. Certainly a better fit than his usual over-sized suits. “If anyone’s having a midlife crisis, it’s me.”

It becomes a very late birthday gift. He steps outside while she’s paying and frowns wrathfully at the shirtless mannequin in the window. She'd insisted on the one in the window. A policewoman eventually tells him to desist.

 

 

 

They eat lunch standing up in the alley behind the diner and try their best to ignore the smell of the rubbish in the skips. She plucks a piece of carrot from his stew. The carrots in his meals are always reserved for her. In exchange, she orders a side of chips for him to dip into his coffee, a ritual she finds alternatingly upsetting and amusing. He eats as though food is a new concept, as if he’s only lived off of the floating packets of liquid that astronauts eat in space. She thinks it’s a wonder that he’s as thin as he is. Most things he puts into his body are fried, glazed, or all of the above.

Marcus tugs a ratty old paperback out of his jacket pocket and holds it out as though logic and reason dictates that there must be some other purpose for it than reading. The book in question is Jane Austen’s  _Persuasion._

“So far it’s just boring posh small talk, hypochondriac women, and the awkward romanticisation of our imperialist past.”

She frowns at him as though this is by far the most useless opinion he’s ever had. He might as well have told her that he’s decided to take a moral stance against underwear and all people from Surrey, especially those who wear underwear, which is presumably everyone at some point.

He squints. “You mean you didn’t tell me to read it as a joke?”

“Are you kidding me?”

She lent an edition to him that was purchased by her gran. Three generations of women have their names inside the cover. But he wanted to see how mad she would get. It’s sort of endearing if you liked angry women in impossibly white trainers.

She takes the book out of his hand and steps onto a crate meant for condiments, making her nearly the same height as him.

“There’s Austen’s perfect dry wit,” she insists, still in that tone of  _‘how could you possibly be so dim?’_ , “the kind you’d want your best friend to have, and the quiet and unyielding tension between Wentworth and Anne, and the subversive gender commentary demonstrated in how Anne’s—”

He gives her a look over from crate to head, enjoying this enough to feel guilty. “Will this be on the exam, Teach?”

She pushes the book into his chest. The faintest flicker of a smirk. “You’ll bloody finish this whether you like it or not.”

Clara’s going on about her coworkers fancying each other despite the fact that one of them has a boyfriend. Her fingers are outstretched in the air, unburdening themselves of the day’s gossip, the wind beating her hair against her mouth until she raises a forefinger to offhandedly push it away. Marcus resolves to count the cracks on the ground when he catches himself staring a bit too long.

“Of course,” she says, “it’s obvious to everyone  _but_  her, and every time they speak to each other, I’m standing there in the middle thinking,  _‘Danger zone_.’”

He clears his throat and replies in all seriousness, “Does your boss know that his employees are having an emotional affair on company time?”

She puts her hands on her hips. “Funny coming from you, Mr. ‘We Can’t Romanticize Our Imperialist Past.’”

He doesn’t have a response to that aside from looking impish, the beginning of a funny story playing on his lips. “I finished  _Persuasion_.”

She grabs hold of his wrist with the sheer urgency of pulling the emergency brake on a train. He suspects she would wave down all of London’s traffic and birds and baby carriages if she could. “Everybody, shut up,” she’d demand, “we’re about to witness a bloody  _miracle_.”

_“And?”_

“It wasn’t entirely a waste of my time.” He disengages himself from her, sturdies the strap of his Gibson on his shoulder, and continues on his way.

She lingers behind in quiet delight in spite of his answer being the anti-climax of the year. He had hoped for her reaction. It motivated every single page he turned.

“That’s a glowing review coming from you,” she says.

“Well.” He studies the pavement as she returns to his side. “It’s strange, actually. I felt like I’d read it before.”

“Maybe you did.” Her eyes are twinkling like she knows something that he doesn’t. “Maybe you even knew Austen in a past life.”

This catches his attention, but he can’t quite grasp why, or why he’s incapable of remembering how he came to live in his own flat but can vividly see himself being urged into a Regency-era cupboard by a rector’s daughter so as not to be found out by one of her five brothers.

“Past life,” he says. “You believe in that kind of thing?”

“I don’t know.” Her attention wavers at the sight of a sad-faced pug and its owner sharing the pavement. She offers the pair a smile, which falters as they pass by. “I rather like the idea of second chances.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Massive thanks to Veradune, who is my cheerleader, read over the first two thirds of this story, and generously provides me her time and very sound advice. Eternal heart eyes for her. As ever, also much gratitude to Rubberglue, who puts up with my non-stop 12/Clara chatter and has also been a source of unconditional encouragement.


	2. Part Two

Pedestrians begrudgingly walk around them while they quarrel in front of the flashing neon signs of a psychic shop, the target of many sideways glances, and neither caring to notice.

“ _I’ve broken rules_. _”_  The Lancashire lilt comes out the most when she feels she has something to prove. He can practically see the proverbial hair coiling out of place.

He folds his arms smugly. “What rules are those?”

Marcus likes to think that Clara operates in extremes as far as rule breaking is concerned, the offences having to do with either a library book or grand theft auto. He isn’t sure if they’re close enough for criminal confessions yet. Would that make him an accomplice? Are they close enough to be accomplices?

She huffs, her own arms now folding defensively against her chest, her cheeks receding into her hair as she slouches into a pensive pout. She doesn’t like being considered uptight, and empirically, having befriended him, he knows that she isn’t. There’s just a special earthly joy in provoking her, seeing all her energy thrown into proving him wrong.

“One time I almost kept a book after it was recalled. The print was out of edition and—” she sees him smirk into the wet pavement. “ _Shut up_.”

 _Almost._ Clara Oswald with her perfect attendance record. Clara Oswald taking deep pride in how perfectly she colours within the lines. Clara Oswald rewinding all her VHS tapes and organizing them alphabetically.

He claps a hand on her shoulder. “Doing anything tonight?”

She heaves an impatient sigh. “Sleeping. Okay with that?”

“Overrated. I have a better idea.”

“No.”

“We’re crossing a thing off your bucket list.”

“No, no, no,  _you_  of all people don’t get to write my bucket list.”

He taps her nose playfully. “Snogging Ryan Elba does not an interesting bucket list make.”

“Don’t you drag my future husband into this.” He’ll later realise that Clara neglected to correct him on this. She thought that he might as well learn the hard way, which will be the public embarrassment of telling a group of people that the new James Bond is Ryan Elba.

“I swear," she lets him tug her in the direction of Chinatown, “if this ends with our stealing coins from a NatWest ATM—”

 

 

 

They make it to Trafalgar Square, gasping for breath from outrunning minicabs while crossing the streets. Hanging on to each other like children on a school trip. The square is completely abandoned by now, save for the odd shivering theatre-goer trying to make their way back to the tube. Clara thinks she could lay claim to the space, make-believe that it exists only for her. Marcus gestures at his surroundings, as if reading her mind, and says, “This is my office, by the way.”

She makes a show of looking around and sets her sights on the National Gallery coated in golden light. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”

He intends to illicitly enter the museum after hours, assuring her that he’s got a friend on the inside, whatever that means. She feels strangely calm about the whole breaking and entering thing. It’s a matter of stubbornness and pride, really. As a child, she held her breath for eight minutes because a neighbour’s kid said she couldn’t make it past five. It’s rather a feat that she hasn’t lost an eye given her propensity to take on any challenge set in front of her.

He seems to know what he’s doing, she’ll give him that. Dodging into the back, his angling both of them so as to avoid being picked up by CCTV. He picks a lock here, lifts a ventilation grill there, and insists that she need not worry about crawling through tiny spaces. She’s built like a man, he assures.

“Kindly enrol yourself in a masterclass for manners,” she tells him while crouched inside a ventilation shaft, bestowed with a full view of his arse, and not entirely sure that she’s in a position to tell him off with much effect.

“Do you teach that as well?” he yells back. Maybe it was a Glaswegian thing but his yelling voice also always sounded oddly Cockney.

 

 

 

They walk out of a backroom allegedly made aware to him by his man on the inside, who is nowhere to be found. While she’s confident there isn’t any foul play involved, he is still probably full of shit. In truth, she doesn’t want to dwell too much on her motivations for letting him get away with it, what it reveals about her, how there’s more to it than  _just_  stubbornness and pride. 

She boasted never being the boy crazy sort. She still could, hypothetically. Marcus could safely not be categorized as _a boy_.

“Why couldn’t we have done this during the day?”

“I don’t do crowds." He guides her toward the seventeenth century paintings.  _Christ._  Could he be anymore antisocial?

“And daylight?”

“And selfies.”

“And indoor light?”

“And staff eyeing you like you’re about to deface something.”

“Out of all these paintings, which one would you most likely deface?”

“ _Clara Oswald_.”

She imitates the tone of a museum guide, posh and rehearsed, like she woke up wearing a blazer. “They have yet to hang the "Clara Oswald” in the National Gallery. You’ll be too aged and infirm to deface it by then, I imagine.”

He smiles in the way that he does whenever she makes a joke at his expense, staring straight ahead as if there were an audience, his silently beseeching of them,  _“Can you believe her?”_

She should tell him that he sounds like her gran, the one who worked as a secretary in Blackburn. Her other grandmother became pregnant out of wedlock in the sixties and currently holds the town record for the highest number of times anyone’s ever ridden the Big One, a steel rollercoaster on the Pleasure Beach. It should be noted that it opened when she was fifty four.

“I would deface the most racist one,” Clara says, “but that’s just me.”

Marcus considers that and shrugs in agreement. “Yeah, alright.”

 

 

 

The darkness invests the museum’s works in a ghostly sentience, producing an impression of being watched, as if it were the details of Clara and Marcus being beheld and considered.

Marcus recites the histories of any work she points out. Describing the smell of gunpowder and trigger-ready hands trembling in Manet’s “Execution of Maximillian.” He claims that Da Vinci’s assistants came down with the red plague while working on “The Virgin on the Rocks.” A mysterious doctor helped Da Vinci finish it and saved his assistants. “He was never heard of again.” Marcus is all wide eyes and magician hands, making her laugh.

Clara concedes the existence of a mysterious man on the inside when they manage to make it to the Impressionists without detection. Even so, she asks how they’ll manage not to show up on the CCTV inside the museum.

She cuts him off before he answers. “The man on the inside?”

“How did you know?” She can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic.

Marcus stares at Van Gogh’s “The Sunflowers” much longer than any other painting, a finger anthropologically hovering over an inscription written on the vase.

“Amy,” he reads as though the name were a question. “I think I once knew someone named Amy.”

He looks at Clara as though she’s supposed to know who he’s forgetting, understand the possible significance. She does not. Many people knew an Amy. One of her favourite authors was an Amy.

They hear footsteps. “Your man?” she hopes.

He shakes his head. “Guard.”

“Oh, good.”

Marcus wraps his hand around hers tightly and looks at her with such crazy intensity that she can’t help smiling. “Run,” he says.

He leads her in maze-like turns through the heavy shadows of the museum, both grinning from the flash of adrenaline and at the fun to be had from their own wilful ignorance of common sense.

“Here.” He pulls her into a recess in the Salisbury Wing. They cling to each other in a façade of an embrace, her head pressed to his chest, his arm firm across her shoulders, and his back pushed against the wall.

“Anybody there?” the guard asks, having caught up with them and on the verge of pointing his flashlight in their direction.

“Yes, Mr. Johnson, it’s me.” The voice belongs to a Hitchcock-like silhouette holding a cane.

“Is that—?” Clara whispers. Marcus nods his head and leans in slightly to hear their conversation.

“Sorry, sir.” Johnson, the guard, tips his hat. “Thought I heard voices.”

“Happens. Dark old building. Could be ghosts—or the paintings come alive! Wouldn’t that be marvellous? You never know, you know?”

Johnson hesitates, in no mood to indulge him. “Erm, best be on my way, sir.”

“Oh, yes,” the man says cheerfully. “Yes, yes.” He watches the guard leave the room, clasping his hands over the head of his cane like an elder statesman. When it’s safe, the man looks over his shoulder in their direction. “If I were you, Marcus, I might find an emergency exit in the closed rooms of the North Wing.”

With that, the man leaves them, and Marcus rolls his eyes to mask his own mortification at having to be rescued.

Clara stops holding her breath. “You a spy at some point?”

“No,” he says. “Just curious.”

“Shame.” She pillows her cheek against his heart. “I would have liked knowing a spy.”

She breathes into the layers of clothing in which he insulates himself. He smells of soap and sweat and fresh air. Clara realizes that the waist of his coat has been crumpled between her knuckles, and she lets her arms drop to her side.

Her eyes fall on each of his individual features as if tasked to paint him. His fine long lashes, the bump in his nose, his thin mouth. She lingers there, on its makings, what one might do to it.

Clara lifts her gaze. “Let’s not break any more rules.”

He cocks his head to one side, a calm confidence in his eyes. “‘Let’s not break any more rules’ what?”

She replies, “Without each other.”

He smiles and lets her pluck him out of the shadows. “‘Course not, boss.”

 

 

They take the bus home during a tube strike after huddling in an endless queue with other displaced commuters. By some miracle, they find two seats together at the front of the upper floor. More exhausted than usual, they sit in silence. Clara props her elbow against the windowsill and feels a twinge of pity for the cacophony of open umbrellas passing beneath them, the sight distorted through droplets clinging to the glass.

She sniffles, having woken up with a cold, and he offers her his handkerchief with an expression like he’s never witnessed a sneeze in his life, having apparently been descended from an obscure clan of Scots immune to viral infections.

“Cheers,” she says, dabbing the handkerchief in the most inconspicuous way possible, surprised by how expensive the cloth feels. Perhaps it was inherited.

His fingers are tapping an impatient rhythm on his trousers, what one might hear from a military band, and she finds herself transfixed by the strangely beautiful ring on his left hand.

“Were you ever married?”

He snorts, amused. “Are you proposing?”

She looks out at the Piccadilly Lights before them. “Would you say yes?”

Her heart races when made to wait for an answer. He’s joined her in watching the electric advertisements for Coca Cola and McDonalds with, to no one’s surprise, faint disapproval.

She was kidding. Of course. Even kidding about it feels…  _exciting_.

“Where would we go?” he finally says, a smile on his lips.

The bus turns a corner, and they’re provided fleeting views of elegant terraces and upscale shops and restaurants.

“Not back to our old lives,” she says. “Remember the end of  _The Graduate_ — the look of quiet desperation? I wouldn’t want that.”

“Then the only appropriate next step is catapulting ourselves into the stars.”

His voice thickens on the last word in a way that compels her to turn her head and catch him looking up at the coal-black sky, unfilled by a single visible star due to the light pollution.

Feeling her gaze, he turns to see her smiling, protectively gripping his handkerchief in her fist, but he resists smiling back, disagreeing that anything he says would deserve such a reaction.

They can hear the low chatter of different languages above the whirring and whooshing of the bus in motion, sounds of everyday life that have always put her at ease. Her parents rode the night bus with her as a newborn. It was the only way to get her to sleep.

“You never answered my question,” she says.

“Yes.” He watches her sombrely. “I was once married.”

A heavy silence descends, and Clara studies the insecure but calm physicality in which he looks down at his lap and tightens his coat around his waist. There’s something about the quiet panic that crosses his face that suggests that his reluctance isn’t because it is painful to speak of it, but because he might not be able to remember a wife’s name anymore, or what she was like, or why she’s gone, that he feels stricken over his no longer being able to remember the life he once shared with someone precious.

She thumbs the handkerchief’s intricate embroidery, reconsidering whether it had been gifted by a blood relative after all. “I’ll give this a wash before I return it.”

“Keep it.”

“Oh, no, I—”

“It’s yours,” he insists. “I don’t often get to give gifts, so…”

She declines to add that she’s just wiped mucous all over his gift and accepts it with an appreciative smile. “Alright.”

 

The smile from the bus fades by the time Clara reaches the estate, her succumbing to a sense of queasiness, the knowing of bad news before hearing it.

She enters her flat and presses her back against the door, body sliding down to sit on the floor, phone cradled in her hands. Its screen the only light in the room.

She finds photos from university, her favourites of Danny, and it becomes difficult to breathe. He was incapable of being in a photo without making some face, kissing the bone of her cheek in front of a Midsummer’s Eve bonfire, holding the phone at a pub for a celebratory photo after final exams. She tipsily buries her face in his ribs in that one. They look like two people who are immune to misfortune.

He’s been gone two years, eleven months, and twenty six days. She's been meticulous in measuring his absence, nursing the ache in her heart like a vigil.

Clara sets the phone on the floor and lies next to it, resting her head on clasped hands, numbly staring at the screen until it dims out.

A dull dread has been growing within her. Of history repeating.

Why can’t Marcus remember his wife?

 

 

 

“Older guitar strings tend to break,” Marcus explains. Something to do with oxidation and the picking and bending causing stress and his being careless about restringing his guitar.

He’s so preoccupied with the mundanities of guitar maintenance that he doesn’t notice how Clara looks at him, like he might shuffle off this mortal coil at any given moment, her uncertain of how to confront him over what is at best a _bad feeling_ and silently telling herself to get a grip until further notice.

He takes the guitar to the shop of a person who knows a person, an establishment that charges a reasonable price, and as it turns out, fated to get burglarized the very next night. To the surprise of no one, they don’t have the insurance to compensate their customers.

Life is shit. Business as usual. The tried-and-true Scottish philosophy confirmed once more, and he’s out of a job until he can save enough to find a similar guitar. The price close to a thousand pounds.

Two days later, Clara’s summoned to Regent’s Park and finds him crouched on the pavement working as a chalk artist, somehow having managed to get a commission from the council to create a mural that might encourage civic togetherness or public service or some other lofty but vague political term.

She brings takeaway as he’s likely forgotten to eat, the contents of which include a sandwich bag full of sugar. Anyone might think she’s smuggling cocaine.

“I went to art school,” he says.

“You did not.” She grins and folds her arms across her ribs to admire his work.

 _“I did.”_  He scrutinises what he’s etched through the lens of a digital camera, his grey brow arched so sharply she thinks it might split in two.

His style is vivid, multi-dimensional, bewitching, as though he’s carved out a part of the earth to reveal an entirely different universe livingunder their feet, where fairy tales are born. He’s drawn the inside of a cavernous spaceship, austere and slick, but also imbued with a whimsical warmth, and creatures populating the interior that are both wonders and terrors. Eerie stone angels weeping into their palms, humanoid figures in orange jumpsuits, pale plastic-smooth faces devoid of expression, and conversely, figures in grey pyjamas with thin tentacles spilling out of their mouths.

Off to the side, for no apparent reason, he’s drawn a pleasant enough looking man in his eighties wearing a jumper and a red beanie.

“I think I’ll call him Wilfred,” Marcus says. “He looks like a Wilfred, don’t you think?”

“The council wants to frighten children, do they?”

“Nah, children love it.” He makes a face. “The parents, on the other hand…”

The council sides with his critics, and at the suggestion of his supervisor, he draws something nice, a scene set on Blackpool Pleasure Beach at dusk with a young girl and her mother riding a rollercoaster. The project is pulled before he can collect the funds to return to busking, his investors having decided that chalk drawings will do little to touch hearts and minds.

His career as an artist ends as he watches an afternoon shower destroy his drawing.

 

 

 

He is made to wear a triangular white paper hat at his next job at an Islington chocolate shop and is promptly informed that he has a bad attitude, not being able to quite fake the enthusiasm needed. They finally ask him to leave when he’s caught giving away leftover chocolates to children and berating an adult for not knowing where Paisley is. The merchandise is recompensed out of his wages.

“Only you would have a bad time selling chocolate for a living,” Clara says on the tube as she stands up to offer an elderly woman her seat in a crowded carriage.

The train’s jerking makes her wobble, and Marcus clutches her wrist. He’s not even looking, Evening Standard in one hand and a shoulder against a glass divider. All she can do is look dumbly down at his fingers feeling hot on her wrist.

“Put your hand in my pocket.” He’s reading a review for the Berliner Philharmoniker.

“Excuse me?”

“My jacket pocket,” he says, missing the point.

He lets go of her wrist, so she can slip her hand into his trench to find about fifty pounds worth of gourmet chocolates. Her mouth drops open. “You took—”

“Severance package.” He talks in a film noir whisper, body shifting into her personal space. “Interested?” He finally looks up, his mouth forming a tentative smile as though he were daring her, and is pleased to see Clara nod eagerly and waste no time in exhuming a pouch of chocolates.

“Aside from a few moral issues,” she turns the clear packaging decorated in gold engravings and decorative ribbon, “this is rather sweet of you.”

He finds her beaming and points a circumference around her face, as if to point out that she’s left the house wearing her shirt inside out. “You’re making a face.”

She continues making it a bit more emphatically, laughing a little.

“Why are your eyes—” He tilts his head like an owl and inspects her closer and then blusters, “Oh, please don’t emote at me. I’ve had a long day.”

She shoves a butter bonbon in his mouth and relishes in the pacifying effect it has on him. “ _As I was saying_ , thank you.”

 

 

 

She pulls some strings and finds him a job at a pub across the street from the diner. He develops mathematical formulas for creating cocktails and minds his own business, the clientele few and of a certain brand that he can tolerate.

That is until a man enters a week into it, stout and square headed, Fred Flintstone meets Billy Sikes from  _Oliver Twist_.

Billy, as Marcus decides to call him, rolls up the sleeves of his jaundice-toned blazer and cosies up to a woman sitting alone at the bar. The propositioning quickly changes from second-hand embarrassing to something aggressive and unsettling, something even  _Marcus_  notices, so he goes to situate himself between them. The man’s breath smells like urinal cakes. “You’re scaring her.”

Billy gapes at him and then looks over at some patrons in disbelief, expecting them to come to his defence. “I’m expressing myself. Like any red-blooded male.” He draws his face close and says in a low snarl, “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, old man?”

Marcus coolly stares, impenetrable. “Right to express yourself, is it?”

Billy is knocked onto the floor before he can answer, flying slapdash off of his stool as though hit upside the chin with a cricket bat.

Marcus rubs his knuckles at the immediate searing pain that comes with hitting someone the wrong way.

The room raptly watches, and the woman covers her mouth in shock.

Marcus smiles at her self-consciously, and half a second later, Billy springs up from the ground and enthusiastically returns the favour. Marcus grips at the bar to stay on his feet and the pads of his fingers skims the bone of his jaw. Blood pools in his mouth.

Billy charges forward. “You’re dead, mate.” At least he’s graduated from “old man” to “mate.” It’s the little things.

They grapple on the floor, furniture toppling and crashing around them as onlookers shout and hurry away.

Billy plants his knees on either side of his hips. Marcus tries to dislodge the man’s fingers from his throat and push him off. With his advantage in breadth and youth, Billy might deliver on the death threats if he really puts his mind to it. Historically, Marcus has proven to be actually pointless in a fight and thinks to himself how ridiculous it is that he’s hearing the Benny Hill theme tune in his head in the last moments of his life, that his last meal was chewing on a stick of spearmint gum. He hadn’t even gotten a chance to see Clara that morning.

Someone smashes a bottle of Herefordshire Cider on Billy’s head, his opponent’s eyes rolling backward as he drops to the floor. Marcus stares at the soaking lump collapsed on his dusty Doc Martins, tongues the bloody wound on his bottom lip, and envisions tiny cartoon birds flying around Billy’s still terribly square head. He might have birds of his own. Consciousness is such a highly underrated feat.

Standing above the man is the woman whom he was meant to save, holding the remnants of a broken bottle and understandably unnerved.

“Name’s Mary,” she says. “Might as well introduce myself.”

“Happy to know you, Mary,” he replies, gracelessly spitting out blood.

He loses his job, pays for the damage, leaving him even more penniless than before. He could write a song about it. No charges are pressed thanks to Mary explaining the situation to the police and the witnesses taking his side. The word “self-defence” is strewn about several times, no one (aside from Billy) bothers to remind that Marcus was the one who threw the first punch.

Clara runs across the street with a platter of fish and chips balanced on her palm. She ends up handing it to a large man with a walrus moustache, offering it to him with such matter-of-factness that he knew not what else to do.

Marcus expects her to be furious after everything she went through to get him into that pub. Instead, she looks sadly at the swelling, at his cuts and bruises, asks if he was hit near any internal organs. Apparently, a scolding is overkill after a severe beating. This feels somehow worse. He doesn’t like to be seen as fragile, especially by her.

She gets over it when she sees the other bloke, stares daggers is more like it, throwing a look at him that translates into having a very particular set of skills that she would use to find and kill him.

“There  _must_  have been a less violent way to have helped that woman,” she says when they walk home. He wants to protest that not everyone can make silent threats with their massive eyeballs.

“I don’t know what came over me.” He swallows hard, which, predictably, is dead painful.

“You always struck me as the clever sort. Outwitting your opponents instead of sloshing them in the face.”

If he didn’t know any better, he’d think that she sounded proud or at least somewhat amused. He supposes it  _is_  funny with his haphazard fists and roaming the streets smelling of alcohol that he didn’t drink. 

“Yeah,” he answers, his voice rough and forlorn. It might be best if he let her go, seeing as that he’s more trouble than he’s worth, amnesiac, unemployed,  _useless,_ and not even able to finish a fight against an Englishman.

“Oi, you.” She takes his chin and has him face her, brushes imaginary lint from his shoulder. It might just be dried blood. “I would have done the same, if it’s any consolation.”

He smiles, tight-lipped, knowing very well that she would, and makes the executive decision to wait another night to tell her to piss off for her own good.

“Very gallant of you to walk me home, Clara Oswald.” He offers her his arm, which she accepts by linking it into hers.

“Chin up,” she says. “It’s not over ‘till it’s over.”

 

 

 

She finds him in Trafalgar the next day looking at other buskers with envy. He fails to notice her shivering in front of him until she exaggeratedly clears her throat.

He looks up to see her taking a bank issued envelope out of her purse, and his face falls. “Who did you kill?”

Ignoring his comment, she sits beside him. She’s taken money from her savings. Clara wonders if he even has a bank account. He seems like the type to keep everything in a tin box under his bed.

“I think this should be enough.” It _should_ be enough combined with the relatively little he's managed to scrape from his jobs.

He flinches, taking on the task of being embarrassed for them both. “Clara, no.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve already done enough, and you’re as destitute as I am.”

She rolls her eyes with an affectionate exasperation. “Does everything have to be about the redistribution of wealth for you?”

“No.” He pushes her hand away. “I’m not—I won’t take charity.”

“This isn’t charity.” Her grin splinters into a grimace, annoyed at him for making her feel as though she’s done something wrong. “This is one mate helping another.”

(He could live the rest of his life without hearing the word  _mate_ ever again.)

“If I’d known you were going to do something like this, I wouldn’t have signed up to be your mate,  _mate_.” He grits out the last word. The edge in his voice the kind heard when you think someone is losing their respect for you. It only makes her more cross. For all his knee-jerk curtness, how dare he think of meaning it?

“Piss off,” she says. “You can’t make a living without a guitar, and nobody will bloody hire you for anything else.”

They stare at each other coldly until his face softens, the tension withering away as quickly as it had arisen, both glancing at the other apologetically.

“Sorry,” she says, looking away.

A smile twitches at the curve of his mouth, the opposite of offended. She’d given him the opportunity to tease her. “Have you ever considered motivational speaking?”

“You’ll pay me back,” she declares, the fight swept back into her.“How about that? Take me on holiday somewhere.”

“Clara Oswald," he breathes, heartsick and scanning her face, "I’d take you anywhere.”

She struggles to keep a straight face when he’s looking at her so earnestly, when her mind’s slipped into imagining a holiday together, navigating foreign motorways, fighting over the stereo, floppy straw hats, and ratty swimming costumes. The idea of him in one nearly short-circuits her brain.

He grips the envelope, his hand unsteady with hesitation as if there were a pound of flesh at stake. She exhales deeply when he finally takes it, a weight lifted.

“Thank you.” He gazes back up at her. “This is—” He leans over, fingers folding against her jacket sleeve, and closes his eyes to press a kiss onto her forehead. The abrupt tenderness surprises her into a shy grin, her cold cheeks turning pink, and his eyes snap open as though he’s even taken himself by surprise.

He releases her and proceeds to determinedly stare straight ahead at a statue of a lion, exhilarated, dazed, and reckoning with the fragrance of her hair having infiltrated into his chest.

They sit shoulder to shoulder in a cosy silence, seemingly oblivious to the nearby clamour of tourists and school children. Clara continues to grin into her lap and kicks her heels against the stone fountain behind her feet, terribly pleased with herself over getting her way and shaking her head in deep, happy embarrassment.


	3. Part Three

Clara plays a secret game in her head. A dangerous tradition.

Halfway between any break in which she gets to see Marcus, she seriously considers never going back to work, simply staying with him and walking as far as their legs could bear it. Every day she comes closer to the brink, a Miltonic contest of Russian roulette. In the end, indigence is never as romantic as it is in fiction.

The thought of leaving everything is terrifying but wields the joyous power and crescendo of a Springsteen song, makes her feel as though she were avoiding a bit of fantastical destiny that she was always meant to fulfil. The fantasy helps her get her through her shifts.  _Survive the day and adventure awaits._

She recites this inwardly when she takes the fall for Ivy, a sweet-natured new hire who entered the wrong amount into the till. It results in a missing total far less egregious than her manager, Russell, deems it. Russell is Phil's hero, the boss he threatens to tell everything. The man takes any staff error as a personal offence.

Ivy has a kid to feed. Clara can survive a mistake. The advantage of being a neurotic with a bubbly personality is that she is well-liked by her co-workers and customers, sneaking the latter extra food and carrying conversations like their closest friend while serving, restocking, sweeping, and facing the dinner rush single-handedly. She endures it for the pleasure of a job where she’s only able to sit down during approved visits to the loo.

Russell doesn’t believe her. She’s never made a mistake yet, and while he won’t fire her, he feels the need to teach her a lesson for taking the fall for Ivy, as though this indicates a shift in allegiance from him to his subordinates, making her less trustworthy and useful to him—something even worse than a clerical error.

“I’m afraid the difference will come out of your pay,” Russell scolds in front of a family of four that she’s serving. “I’m really very disappointed. This is truly unacceptable.” He darts a look at Ivy, who Maisie has put to making the coffee with a protective arm on her shoulder. Even Phil looks vaguely concerned. “An amateur mistake that we can’t afford to make.”

Clara nods solemnly. “It won’t happen again.”

“It certainly will not.” He points at the till. “No point in dawdling. You’ve got work to do.”

She sighs, moves behind the counter, and gives herself a moment to sulk when Russell looks away. She can’t let him see that he’s gotten to her.

_“Close your eyes, and I'll kiss you.”_

Russell squints hard enough to pop a vein. “What the actual ruddy hell?”

Clara could recognise that voice anywhere. She looks past Russell to find Marcus standing at the diner's entrance. His guitar strap slung over his shoulder, a brand new instrument hanging at his front, posturing as if assuming battle stations. The door clinks closed behind him.

“Marcus?” Clara says.

“Who?” Russell demands and turns around.

Marcus locks eyes with her boss, strums defiantly, and then begins walking toward Clara. He looks like he might sprint a mile.  _“Close your eyes, and I'll kiss you. Tomorrow, I’ll miss you. Remember, I’ll always be true…”_

He’s playing a touch slower version of “All My Loving” by the Beatles, as if building up to something. Marcus very rarely sings love songs. Especially jaunty pop ones. This is a very first.

_“And then while I’m away, I’ll write home every day, and I’ll send all my loving to you.”_

He stops dead when they meet face-to-face and lifts his sunglasses. “Hi,” he gazes at Clara. “Hello.”

“You’re mad,” she beams.

“Well, I didn’t like to see you upset.”

She realises that he’d seen the whole scene through the window, taking the fall for Ivy, getting chewed out by Russell. They were meant to meet after work and he’d come early to show off his new guitar, an exact replica of the one he’d lost. Ferrari red.

Russell steps in between Clara and Marcus. “Alright, whatever this is, you can do it outside of company time—”

Marcus slides down his sunglasses, spins around, and strums again. The inveterate showman. This time properly speeding the chords for the next verse, his version even more punk and playful than the original, and of course, more Scottish. The most melodious ‘fuck you’ ever sounded.

 _“I'll pretend that I'm kissing the lips I am missing…”_ He catches Clara’s eye. They both take a moment to redden before he goes on to sing along the counter and smile at each of the staff. Phil included. _“…and hope that my dreams will come true. And then while I'm away, I'll write home every day, and I'll send all my loving to you.”_

Maisie has propped both her elbows on the counter and rests her chin on her hands, never more chuffed, an extra at the end of  _An Officer and a Gentleman_. The customers follow her lead. Some thinking it part of the in-house entertainment. “Oh, lovely,” a woman coos, “I always liked that Keith Richards.”

Clara returns to the centre of his attention as he finishes working the room. He bends down on one knee before her. A paragon of courtly love meets Joey Ramone.

_“All my loving, darling, I’ll be true. All my loving, all my loving. All my loving, I will send to you.”_

The restaurant bursts into abject silence. Except the woman who presumes to love Keith Richards. She claps enthusiastically.

“Right, you.” Phil points at Marcus and sets down the telephone. “I’ve called the police. They’re on their way.”

Groans toll in dismay. Though initially taken aback, Russell nods firmly at him for taking the initiative.

Clara fumes.  _“Phil!”_

 

 

 

They make it to her home after she bails him out. He has a court date. Charged with causing a nuisance and busking on private property without the owner’s explicit consent. Or some nonsense for which she nearly decked Phil in the face.

Marcus grins the entire way home. It reminds her of the little ginger boy in  _Love Actually_. The one who somersaulted through Heathrow security to tell his schoolmate that he loved her.

It also amuses him to no end that they put him in with muggers and fascists for singing an abridged version of a Beatles song. She suspects this isn’t his first time in jail.

Clara puts on the kettle and goes about tidying up while Marcus is in the shower. He had to hunch forward on the way to the toilet to avoid hitting his head on the slumping ceiling. Seeing him attempt to move around in her flat makes her feel like she’s the goblin queen of some swamp hovel. Her home cluttered like a landfill despite her best efforts.

He walks in on her removing her apron and reacts as though the act is something private that he isn’t meant to witness, her transition from work to the person she is at home. He’s wearing his faded old t-shirt and trousers. Bare feet curling on her carpet. She’s never seen him wearing this little and looks away. Her own bashfulness makes her internally wince.

Clara picks up two mugs of tea and offers him one. She can smell her shampoo in his jutting, untamed curls gone temporarily dark. Something of the scent of strawberries and cream that she’d grabbed from a Boots shelf with a perfunctory interest.

Marcus takes a sip and studies the rim of the mug. “Where did you get the money?”

He’s asking about the bail. She feels like he’s been asking this sort of question a lot lately, like some put upon wife of a mob consigliere.

“Phil paid," she chuckles. “He just doesn’t know it yet.” Because why not get out of one crime by committing another? It’s dog-eat-dog out there, and she’s in— she’s invested.

Marcus shakes his head. “I’ll pay him back before you get into trouble.”

“I’m not going to get into trouble.”

“ _Clara_ —”

“It doesn’t matter now, alright? I’m determined to go five minutes of my life without worrying about money.”

He is wary but concedes the point. “Five minutes,” he says. “And then I’ll get you a winning lottery ticket. Or sell a kidney. Write a pop hit. In that order.”

“You do that.” She smiles at him reassuringly, tries to make him feel less indebted than she suspects he already does—even though making his life better feels like the most selfish thing she could do. Selfishness, indulgence, and bloody-mindedness all tangling inside her.

They move to her balcony and look out at the sky over the East End. The night’s drunks shout inanities as they climb out of basement pubs. They hear ambulance sirens, and twinkling, mismatched lights dart along the block to someone’s aid.

Marcus watches thoughtfully, almost with yearning, and then catches her staring.

“What is it?”

“You get this look on your face sometimes,” she says. “Clark Kent banished to Kansas without his powers.”

He laughs. Mouth wrinkling and crooked. “What a boring comic that would have made. Traded in my cape for a life of itinerancy and abuse, did I?”

For the first time, she lets him see her worry, the secret fear that she’s been harbouring.

“Have you been to a doctor?”

He looks at her in surprise, and he must know exactly what she’s referring to. Surely. His gaps in memory. All signs of a degenerative disease.

But then she regrets it. For ruining the moment. For making it real by acknowledging it. She’s intruding.

“Sorry,” she says. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

He smiles softly. “I won’t then, if it’s alright with you.”

They look back onto the cloudlessness and the crescent moon and finish their tea in silence.

“Kansas isn’t so bad, anyway,” he finally says.

Her mouth forms a thin playful line. Even when her heart thumps from all that is left unsaid. “It’s pretty bad.”

He laughs. “Yeah.”

She takes theirs mugs, sets them onto the ledge of a window, and then turns back to stand with her arms somewhat outstretched.

“Have we ever hugged?”

“You want to hug?”

She puts her hands on her hips. “Don’t have to make it weird.”

“How am I making something that’s already weird  _weird?”_

“Okay, listen." This feels like a negotiation. “What you did today, that was the sweetest,  _stupidest_  thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

The silence that follows is, for lack of a better word,  _weird._ They have a de facto agreement forbidding sentimental mumbo jumbo, and she’s breaking protocol.

“I’m a busker.” He can’t meet her eye. “It’s what I do.”

She swallows back a swell of emotion that would do better not to surface. “Yes, it is.”

There is starlight in her voice, and he knows not what to do, so he turns back to the city and braces his hands on the railing.

She shakes her head. Still standing behind him (the only way she'll get away with it), she wraps her arms around his body and traps his arms at his side. This should not be the hardest thing in the world. Expressing affection. They let out a breath. Her hands clasped over his ribs.

“So, thank you.”

He eventually reaches for her, presses her closer to himself, the slightest smirk on his face.

 _There,_ she thinks.

Time passes. Her nose buried in his shirt; his continuing to hold her hands to the square of his chest and ignoring goose flesh from the cold.

She ends the hug but still possesses him, the pads of her fingers grazing his back, a soft kiss placed onto cotton, some throwaway thing that he’d likely found at Oxfam. She continues trailing kisses languorously along his spine, and wetness grows between her legs.

He closes his eyes and grips the railing tighter, the back of his shirt lifting and her lips on his bare skin.

“I—” he gasps. “I should go.”

Clara nods as though it were a polite formality and focuses her gaze on the fibres of his shirt. “Okay.”

She doesn’t watch him put on the rest of his clothes, choosing instead to hover over the dirty dishes in the sink. It’s not entirely shame, though she suspects that’ll come later. It’s something else, disappointment that she was wrong— that a line was crossed, and she was too arrogant, too blind to realise it.

She feels his eyes on her, the weight of their sadness, and there’s a part of her that wants to twist the knife, make him feel even worse for it. So, she doesn’t acknowledge him. A flash of cruelty riding on the wave of rejection and a tough day.

When he’s gone, she dejectedly presses her temple against the door, tightens her hold on the handle, and curses herself. Stupid.  _Stupid._

She  _was_ wrong. She was wrong, and she lost him for it.

Moments later, a knock startles her, and she opens the door to find Marcus staring back like he’s set out to make the last train. Those daft eyebrows of his making the situation seem even more comical and dramatic than it is.

 

 

 

He might as well have a violin playing cat floating above him considering the look on her face, like there’s something wrong in his head.  _Well_. That bit is likely true.

He’d realised that he couldn’t leave halfway down the corridor. Nearly tripped over himself in the process. Something within him was disintegrating, his chemicals and cells overcome at the possibility of a life absent of her.

It had happened so softly, steadily, how she’d made herself essential to him.

“Thought I’d ask your opinion on something.” He clears his throat. The colour spreading in his face.  _God,_   _is he really doing this?_

“Am I allowed to change my mind?”

“Yes,” she immediately replies, catching her breath, still gripping onto the doorknob like gravity might be malfunctioning.

He gives her a weak smile and points past her. “I, er, also left my guitar.”

She blinks. “Yes.” Her brows furrow, shaken from a daydream, and not entirely sure of what’s happening. “Oh, do you— do you want it back?”

“No, not yet.” He lets out a short self-deprecating laugh. “Because—well, because, I, uh—”

“Yeah.” She closes the door as he walks into her flat. They circle around each other.

He’s hesitant, half expecting her to turn him around, push him against some furniture, resume from where she had left off. He doesn’t want to run this time. Though perhaps he should.

They linger without direction, overthinking crossing the bridge from friendship to whatever the hell sex would do to them. It doesn’t discourage them, the jitteriness and flexing fingers, feeling parched and terrified. The eighty three string orchestra in their heads goading them on.

“The count of five,” she decides, carefully bracing her hands on his arms, always quick with a plan.

It begins with a peck to his cheek.  _One._

She lets go and looks at him expectantly.

His turn. Right.  _This is happening_.

He deliberates for a moment, which she finds funny. Something about his thinking face, she once told him. Her eyes close as he moves nearer, mouth half-open in amusement and anticipation. With the same chasteness, he places a kiss on the tip of her nose. She laughs.  _Two_.

Contently, she opens her eyes and puts her palms to the back of his head. Her thick lashes shade a faraway gaze that falls above his brows. He gets the idea, tilting forward as she stands on the balls of her feet to kiss his forehead.  _Three_.

 _Four._ He goes bolder, aims for a dimple and lands like flint and steel too close to her mouth. Or just close enough to seriously anticipate a fifth kiss. Their first kiss.

He stays there and breathes her in deeply. They can’t come back from this. An unsaid certainty they feel the other realise at the same time.

She draws him to her with her hands on his neck, angling deftly, and the world goes black.  _Five_.

 

 

 

They resolve to take it at a responsible pace. Like the upstanding adults that they are.

Or, maybe not.

Clara’s pulling at his coat and scarf, the Oxfam shirt and the hoodie she purchased, the waistband of his trousers. His thin limbs tumbling backward with the rest of him onto the couch as he’s rid of his shoes and socks.

She fusses at him as if he exists in his waking hours under a cloud of unfolded laundry, slapping away any attempt of his to assist, laughing and swearing amidst hit-or-miss kisses that mostly Marcus initiates, having gained a kind of eager, shaky-breathed momentum.

It is a fact that Clara Oswald swears profusely as a precursor to sex. It’s doubly amazing, because she might one day be a school teacher and regularly look children in the eye.

When he’s down to his pants, she stops and stares.

 

 

 

They have question marks on them. His sodding underpants. “Jesus,” she says, eyeballing the giant bit of red-inked punctuation at the tip of his cock, like some esoteric question on male sexuality. “Jesus.” The word repeating like a broken record. “ _Jesus.”_

“Are you asking my opinion on—?”

Clara takes his face in her hands and kisses him soundly on the mouth, stifling her own laugh. She then swings her leg around his knees and sits on his lap. Her hands determinedly poised on his chest and his own arching around her waist.

From the other side of the wall, they hear Fred Astaire serenading Ginger Rogersthrough the crackling quality of 1935 and Mrs. Aquino’s old video tape. Her neighbour has likely fallen asleep to it. Clara’s mind floods with easy, long grins and flowing gowns, imbuing her with a sense of warmth and magic.

She hears Marcus say her name, smoothing his hands along her thighs. His smile suggests he’s fighting the urge to laugh at himself but is too glad to care.

 _Heaven_ , Fred sings again and again.

She leans her forehead against Marcus’s, begins unbuttoning her uniform, feels his erection between them, doing her best not to just— _to just._

She licks his upper lip, the tip of her tongue and a quick swipe, followed by a kiss that rakes her teeth over his bottom lip. There’s a mischief to it, and he reacts with a grin that grows steadily to the corner of his mouth, where it meets another kiss. The heat in his skin rises. He’s already gotten used to this, being with her this way. She wants to devour him, bury all that he is deep within her, every melody and memory, each breath and ache, the near nakedness before her.

Marcus fingers the long wisps of brown hair coiling along the line of her neck. The strands sift the lights from the city outside, and he looks at her as though he trusts her with each atom of life left within him. Both his palms slide her uniform further down her shoulders and arms until the bright blue fabric sits at her waist.

He presses his thumb over a beauty spot half way between her clavicle and breast, wants to study it as it relates to the rest of her, feathering his breath against her skin. His lips on the hollow of her throat and the top of her breasts.

She tugs at the straps of her bra, twists open the clasp at her back, lets it fall to the floor, and then watches him take in the expanse of newly bare skin. He pulls her closer to the short hairs of his stubble, which makes his face look softer and rounder. She breathes sharply when he takes her nipple between his lips, passes his tongue over it repetitively, his mouth a yielding and deliberate deep, wet pink in the golden dark. One hand cups her breast, and she feels the back of the other moving down her stomach, fingertips hovering below her naval.

He slides past her knickers down to her clit. “There,” she whispers. “There.” She grinds harder against his hand as he enters her, finds her. _There, there, there._

She presses kisses behind his earlobe, gently, experimentally sucking at the skin, leaving a mark. He pants into her hair, the muscles of his neck straining, and she edges away slightly and tugs carefully at the waistband of his pants to take his cock in her hand, applying pressure to the head. They kiss desperately as she strokes him, his groaning into her mouth, rasping and discordant, and bucking in her grasp. He's close.

The last of their undergarments are gone before she eases onto him, his face sinking into the nape of her neck like an old habit and his thumb returning to her clit. She sets the pace against hard and heavy gasps that arise from his throat, and he tightens his hands on her arse, bringing her even more firmly against him. His name no longer sounds like a name on her tongue but flows out like blood, a beloved, nonsense language, the pretty shapes of verses to an illiterate.

She sprawls her fingers sloppily on his lips and teeth when she comes not long after he does. He cradles the start of her spine, and they slump into each other, light-headed and sharing slow, erratic inhales in the night like sobs of relief. There is a sudden strange twinge in her chest, something akin to devastation formed with euphoria, and she thinks she might go mad but then her head clears.

“Marcus,” she murmurs into his skin.

He’s idly thumbing circles on her back. She can feel the calluses he’s earned over the years playing the guitar. “Yeah?”

She bites her lip. “Why exactly  _do_  you have question marks on your pants?”

 

 

 

“ _Tess of the d’Urbervilles_.”

He replies, “Tess deserved better.”

She has her head in his lap, lying sideways on the bed with her cheek pressed against his belly and her shins hanging off the edge. He’s only managed to put on his pants and she in her knickers and his hoodie.

They’re long past the witching hour, back to the same old and sitting in the dark, but also living in their newfound tactility. Passing the time for as long as they’re allowed.

She's already called Maise about covering for her in the morning. Maise's answer: "You've had him, haven't you? You magnificent muppet."

"I'll take that as a 'yes,'" Clara replied before hanging up and returning to Marcus.

The conversation, as usual, has drifted to a subject close to her heart.

“ _Jane Eyre.”_

“Jane deserved better,” he says. “And so did his attic wife.”

“ _The Great Gatsby_.”

“Zelda Fitzgerald deserved better.”

 _“Harry Potter_.”

“His children deserved better.”

She lightly swats his forearm with a fist buried in the long sleeve of his hoodie. Killjoy. In truth, she agrees with every answer—but it’s no good letting these things go to his head.

“Do you like anything in life?”

“Nothing,” he answers. “Especially you, Clara Oswald.”

He cups a hand to her forehead and speaks gently. “I don’t like that you’re kind. That you hoist up little girls by the waist so they can reach drinking fountains. That you always listen to the pensioners at the diner tell the same stories with unconditional enthusiasm. I don’t like that you talk a mile a minute, like you work for the devil and are reading off his fine print. And I’d gladly sign anyway. I definitely don’t like your laugh, or your eyes, or your surprisingly large birthmark shaped like Cornwall.”

She starts to smile. He was riveted when he found that thing on her hip, so much so that she had to scold him into returning to the task at hand.

Marcus licks his lips as he embarks on saying something a little bit more serious, only just.

“I don’t like that you are a spectacle of loveliness, a wonder and a refuge, in the urban blight that has become my life.”

He holds her gaze, an affectionate game of chicken, until she can no longer push back the oncoming blush, her lips curling over being the object of such praise. Especially from him. She quickly slides both her hands up to her face.

“Why are you covering your face?”

“So you can’t see me go red.”

“Why would you go red?”

She removes her hands and lifts his chin.

“Because, sometimes, my dear Marcus, you are quite clever and charming, and I can’t stand those qualities in a man.”

His face at this angle adds a certain boyishness to his smile, boyish idiocy, more like it, as if he were someone who’s always running late and can’t be bothered to tuck in his shirt. Come to think of it, he  _is_  that person.

She can almost imagine what he might have looked like when he first arrived in London. Scared and beautiful and eager for the unusual.

Clara closes her eyes in blissful content and loses herself in the idea. “Have you ever written a song for anyone?”

“Yeah.”

“Who was she?”

“He.” She opens one eye and peers at him. He grins. “ _That_  caught your attention.”

“Where is he?” The first question in her head. It makes her sound like she’s thinking of seeking the man out, the strange kinship with a predecessor in Marcus’s heart.

Marcus leans his head back against the headboard and folds his arms across his chest. He wears a look of distant regret.

“Don’t know. We grew apart. He was a troublemaker.”

She smiles faintly. “You have a thing for troublemakers?”

“I have a thing for aspiring schoolteachers.”

“What about confused fuck-ups?”

“Those especially.” He lifts one knee, propping up her head closer so that he can drop a quick kiss to her brow. “What about you?”

“ _Well_ ,” she says with mock-exaggeration. “I never really understood the appeal of musicians. But then I found this bloke in a train station.”

“Oh, did you?”

“Yes,” she says. “Which absolutely confirmed for me that all musicians are rubbish.”

“It’s always nice to be certain about these things.”

They share a laugh before she turns to her side, away from him, and sighs. “I don’t want to sleep. I have this feeling. Like we should stay awake for as long as we can.”

“Or else?”

“Or else, it ends.”

He studies her and then shrugs, granting an easy favour. “Then we won’t sleep. Never again.”

How easy he makes outrunning a troubled heart, looking away from the pain that stalks each human life.

She sits upright and leans into him close enough to whisper. “What if we go mad?”

“So be it.” His voice carries the softness of sharing one's dearest secret.

Clara kisses him as if beholden to her own self and making up for a lifetime. He feels her shaking and puts his arms around her tightly and shields her from the cold of her flat.

They stay like this. If they stop moving, they might stop time itself.

They finally part when they hear the rainfall of the early morning and the first rumbles of thunder. The world is moving on whether they like it or not.

He reaches for his guitar from the side of the bed.

“You going to serenade me?” she jokes.

He tilts his head. “I’m going to teach you how to play George Harrison.”

She is delighted, neglects to tell him about the clarinet incident of ’97, and moves to sit between his legs as he sets his guitar on her lap.

 

 

 

They drift half-awake and dazed through the Columbia Road Flower Market. One of her favourite places in London. The streets filled with endless blossoms and plum petals speckling the black tarmac. She’s taken him there for breakfast and knows where to go, arms swinging at her side and forging a path through the crowd, all sprightliness and smiles. He follows with a plastic bag of tangerines, a spur of the moment purchase, shades his eyes from the sun and offers a nod to the string ensemble of buskers performing Smokey Robinson.

They receive lingering looks from a couple passing by, more curious than judgmental, like a minor traffic accident.

He cringes slightly. “Why aren’t you a few decades older?”

She’s amused. “Wouldn’t you rather be a few decades younger?”

“I couldn’t cope being in your generation,” he says. “It’s all _Lord of the Flies_  with smartphones.”

“Like your lot were any more sensible.”

She nuzzles her face against his arm. A woman selling magnolias smiles warmly at them, which is more than Clara would have done a few months ago. She imagines pulling Marcus into lifts for a snog. Their becoming the silly people that they used to mock. He’d still have his sunglasses knocked off in the end. She’d make sure of that.

She poises herself over a stall of tulips. Her confession falls headlong into them.

“I’m going to quit.”

“What?”

“The diner. I’m never going back.”

“You’re giving up eating as well as sleeping, are you?”

“Yes,” she says, heedless and thrilled. “Life is too short. I should know.”

He looks on the verge of a grin. “I should be discouraging you.”

“Well, why aren’t you?”

“Because I’d have quit ages ago.” He admits this with a slow and wistful fondness, but soon snaps out of it and points his fingers frantically. “No, shut up, wait. You should never quit a job unless you have another one lined up.”

The anxiousness begins to creep. Common sense always does that. But this is neither the time nor place. It’s a Sunday morning, and she’s bunking work. Last night, he changed his mind. Anything is possible.

“Let’s pretend,” she says. “Let me pretend that I’m brave enough, the world magical enough to do such a thing.”

He smiles piteously, mostly at himself, and tells her a half-truth. “Of course, you are. Of course, it is.”

She takes one of his cold hands in hers and presses his knuckles against her cheek. Together, they’ll find their way out. Guard each other’s dreams and visions.

Clara turns around when she hears the market buskers start a familiar song. “Five Years” by Bowie. A marvellous coincidence.

She turns back around to see his reaction. He’s no longer there. The tangerines scattered at her feet.

Clara searches the crowd, suddenly an infinite, roiling chaos of strangers.

“Marcus?” she calls out. Her stomach clenches, and she hears Bowie’s lines transform from a happy memory into an omen, what it was always meant to be. “Marcus.”

He is gone.

The clock has struck twelve. The spell is broken. He is gone.

 

 

 

Marcus finds himself slumped against a wall in a dark alley. He doesn't know that he's only a few blocks away from the market. His head pounds like blood might gush out of his ears. A woman steps into his line of vision and a man follows. The pair seem to have left some kind of fancy dress. They’re blocking his only route of escape.

The woman speaks first. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

“Anymore, you mean?” Marcus grunts as he tries to stand.

The man gives the woman a sideways glance. “Oh, look, dear. He’s being funny.”

Marcus wonders why they’ve yet to mug him. Bonnie and Clyde. If they had a bit part in  _Plan 9 from Outer Space_. “What the hell do you want?”

The woman kneels and musters some tenderness. The eerie simpatico before inflicting an indoctrination.

“It’s time to bring you back,” she says evenly. "Doctor."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU VERADUNE for being an absolute woman of the hour and reading this in such short notice.


End file.
